My Christmas Family

So I've been feeling this sadness settling in like it does each year right around this time since our first Christmas without Wyatt in 2003.  My mood and temperament noticeably dip so I found myself trying to explain it to my husband last night.  It took alot of nonsensical descriptions before these words came out.

Christmas makes me sad because it's about family and that only reminds me of how incomplete my family is and will always be.  It is the one time of year when my family never seems so incomplete.    I can't say it any better than that.  The boys' birthdays come and go and those days are about them individually and how much I miss each of them.  But Christmas.  Christmas is the time when their presence in our family is so obviously missing to me.  Everyone else in our family (parents and siblings) have all of their children.  I am missing two and I just don't know how not to miss them.  The heart of Christmas, truly the meaning of Christmas is family.  Christmas is the celebration of Christ's birth and the creation of the Holy Family.  It is also the creation of God's own family as he welcomed his only son into this world.  So, you see, any which way you look at it, it's family.  The one thing I value above all else.  My blessed and blessedly incomplete family.

He tried but had no answers.  There are none that I have found over the last ten years since Wyatt's birth.  I don't know that Christmas will ever be the same for me.  It is a very conscious effort to recognize and appreciate the joy that is going on all around me each and every holiday season.  Today I find myself in need of a silent night to spend in quiet reflection and sorrow to make more room for joy from the world tomorrow.

Up on the Rooftop

Since my post on remembrance I am just bursting at the seams wanting to shout from the rooftop "Remember, remember! My sons are gone".  While all of you (family) are making your holiday preparations all I can think about is the empty chair and high chair at my table.  The unwrapped presents under my tree.  The candles in my window.  Blinking away tears.  Gifts are unimportant, dinner is unnecessary.  What is important:  buying something small for their graves, making sure their Christmas tree lights are lit up at night, getting to and from the wintry cemetery, honoring their memory through a gift of charity, hearing their names.
So I'm up on the rooftop waiting for Santa to deliver me the one miracle that even Santa doesn't have in his bag.

Through a Child's Eyes

This weekend I came face to face, quite literally, with the demons of my adolescence.  My congenitally missing lateral incisors.  As a teenager I endured a five plus years of braces, tooth extractions, retainers, rubber bands and finally dental implants to fill in spaces left where no permanent teeth grew.  (Yet another fun genetic grab bag item in my family).  Friday one of those implants failed me in a big way and let's just put it this way, he is no longer with me.  I'm just a wee bit (translation: super duper enormously) sensitive about walking around missing a tooth right in the front part of my mouth so I was joking with my kids that they will have to put up with pirate mom until a temporary replacement is made.  To which they responded that I was not even a good pirate because they at least have gold teeth.  (Sigh).  Some days I just can't win.

I Heart my Heart

Wikipedia defines the heart as "a hollow muscle that pumps blood throughout the blood vessels by repeated, rhythmic contractions.  Gray's anatomy goes on to say "the rhythmical action of the heart is muscular in origin." But most of us probably don't think of the heart in this way.  If we even think of it at all.  That's because the heart goes on beating around 70 beats every minute of every day without any effort from us.  Yet for something so unnoticed, it's role in our lives could not be any more important.

Yet it's still a muscle, one that can be weakened by a sedentary lifestyle and unhealthy habits and strengthened through exercise and healthy living.  A healthy heart is a happy heart.  Except that the heart is more than just a blood pumper.  It is a vital organ of emotional health too.  One that just like the beating drum in our chests needs exercise and healthy habits to function optimally.  After Wyatt and Eli's deaths my heart needed a break and so I tucked it away somewhere safe for a while.  I needed to protect it and keep it from any more hurt because I just didn't know how much it could take. 

I learned this last week that the human heart can take an awful lot.  It can be poked and prodded, shocked and even endure having tiny pieces of it literally killed off and still keep beating.  So too can the metaphorical heart.  I have endured hearing that two of my children, while each in utero, would most certainly die before, during or shortly after their births.  I have carried those little boys to term and watched each one die in my arms within hours of their birth.  I have stood at a tiny bare grave site to bury my first child and then eight years later at my oldest son's grave site by my very own headstone to bury my second son at his feet.  

I have also learned of the heart's incredible capacity for healing.  Both physically and emotionally.  At the age of 25, approximately one percent of the heart's muscle cells are replaced yearly, falling to one half of a percent by age 75 according to Dr. Jonas Frisen of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.  What I can take away from this is that the heart really heals, inside and out.  The heart that I had ten years ago is not the heart that I have today, neither one of them.

Reminder vs. Remembrance

Holidays are a time of celebration.  For those who have lost loved ones they can also serve as times of remembrance and sorrow.    When that loved one has sat at the dinner table holidays past, even just one time, there may smiles and stories to tell.  In my case, neither one of my sons has experienced a holiday.  I have never purchased a little suit or even a vest, never used a dab of gel to smooth an errant cowlick and never gazed across the table into the eyes of my sons.  My grandmother died just a little over a month after Wyatt died and every holiday celebrated at my grandfather's since her chair sits painfully empty, a reminder of her absence - and of her presence for so many years.

I don't have that reminder.  There is no physical evidence aside from the photographs hanging on my living room wall that my sons entered into this family.  We don't keep their things out in the open, they are too precious, too cherished and sometimes just too sad to see all that often.  

So I sit in silence during these holidays, smiling and enjoying the celebrations while silently aching for two little boys who will never come home.  I remember my sons instead of trying to find a way to remind others that they are gone.  I don't think any forced reminders of their absence would make me feel better anyway.  I am too scared to know why others don't acknowledge it and any words uttered in response just wouldn't seem genuine. I liken it to the kind of apology a child gives when her parent insists.  There is nothing that compares to someone's own remembrance of my children.  

I choose remembrance rather than reminders.  In my own way and on my own terms and I've learned not to seek validation in the words and actions of others.  I own this.

Walking in Someone Else's Shoes

It's taken me a long time (likely far too long) to have acquired the ability to silence my thoughts.  I was raised very vocally and to embrace negativity.  My priest referred to this as "awfulizing" yesterday in church.  So I know that some of you who have read my last post, "The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants" may have finished it with a bad taste in your mouth.  Nine years ago I would have too.  Nine years ago I had lost my firstborn and was expecting my first rainbow.  Health, not gender, is all that mattered.  But more than that, had I read my own words I would have felt anger at the author's lack of appreciation and gratitude for what she had been given.  Her complaints about gender would have incensed my grief over the son I had just buried months before when she had so much and I had so little.

Fast forward a few years and a few healthy rainbows and even after having two healthy girls I still would have not been able to swallow those words without tasting the bitterness.  I still would have thought that she just should appreciate what she has and not let what she doesn't eat away at her.  I probably still would have reacted with some anger.  So I understand if my feelings don't punch you in the gut like they do to me.

I get it.  It's hard for me to wrestle with these feelings knowing how very blessed I am to have these four daughters.  I just can't help wondering if these feelings are stringing behind Eli's death, if they've been buried and set aside since Wyatt's death, if they're a culmination of feelings after both boys' deaths or if it's something brought about by the end of my childbearing years?  Probably a little bit of everything.  But will they dim or go away and if so, when?  Will my heart ever put this to rest?  Add another unanswered question to the pile that has accumulated in my last ten years.

I don't know what has brought you to my blog.  Even if I have read every single detail of your loss(es) I could never possibly understand.  Likewise, no one can truly understand mine or these feelings that well beneath the surface.  Words of judgment and comparison come easy, what's hard is letting those words pass unspoken and without action.  

The Heart Wants What the Heart Wants

I'd like to say that I'm completely comfortable being done having children.  But that would be a lie.  My heart betrays any words I could ever utter.  I want to raise a son.  My body just doesn't understand.  Six full terms pregnancies, six cesarean sections, two funerals and two periods of mourning and raising four little girls in ten years has taken a toll.  Okay, a pretty big toll.  I have done two back to back pregnancies twice, both on the heels of a c-section and smack dab in the middle of my period of mourning.  My body and my mind finally told me it was enough.  My head knew that ending my child bearing years was the right choice before my doctor told me that my uterus had thinned out to the point where another pregnancy would be inadvisable.  Tell that to my heart.  There is not a day that goes by when I am not aware of what is missing in this house, this family.  It's not always a conscious "whoa" type of thought.  It most often draws no tears.  But it's there nonetheless.  So I still haven't come to terms with what is and what it is that I deeply want.